Due to last week’s Snowpocalypse here in Seattle, the streets before Christmas were essentially unpassable.  UPS and Fedex had a particularly difficult time getting packages delivered, which resulted in a number of Christmas presents not being under the tree on the 24th/25th.

We made do with the Santa gifts by me going out and buying one more gift each for the kids.  So the “Santa Crisis” was averted, but only just barely.  Thankfully, the kids seem to like their replacement Santa gifts.  However, the gifts from us and my parents hadn’t arrived by then, as did various gift packages from my wife’s side of the family.  Some of those arrived on the 27th, so we ended up with a second Christmas then.

Since then, packages that should have been delivered a week ago have been trickling in and a FEW HAVE NOT YET BEEN DELIVERED.  It’s basically been a full week since Christmas and a good 4 days since the roads have been totally cleared.

The city plan for snow has been a total disaster.  And it’s almost acceptable NOT to have a plan in place for a situation like this, but what is NOT acceptable is to not put an emergency plan together that takes action when a situation like this occurs.  This is not about Christmas gifts (though, that is not a trivial issue where kids are concerned), this is also about city services, public safety, and now with the garbage piling up, public health.

Everyone loves dumplings. Mandoo is a household favorite. These days, it’s so much easier to have them than when I was a kid.

So we said goodbye to my in-laws today after a nice Christmas visit.  Little did they know that they would be snowbound for almost an entire week!  We’ve now got a day and a half of downtime before my sister and her family come into town for New Year’s.  This year, our kids will be 6.5, 5, 3.5, & 1.5 years old, which should make all of them fully interactive.  Unfortunately for them, they will have missed all the snow (so no sledding down the street).  Although, come to think of it, maybe they don’t mind after having survived a few Boston winters.

These days it’s not favorable being a free market supporter.  My alma mater is famous for its free market ideals and its spiritual leader, Milton Friedman. 

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a3GVhIHGyWRM

Pretty cool video of a gigantic asteroid hitting the Earth.  Watch.  Feel warmed by the utter destruction and inevitability of Nature doing whatever the hell it wants. 

You are all no doubt aware of the amazing amount of snow the Seattle area has had over the past week.  It all started with the ominous NoSnow Day on Wednesday, December 17th where all the kids in Seattle were told to stay home due to the threat of snow.  My son declared it “The Worst Snow Day Ever”.  It may very well have been.

But that’s all been made up for starting on Thursday.  The snow has been AMAZING.  It has gotten so deep and so pervasive that the street we live on is now suitable pretty much only for sleds.  The kids have been using the street as a sled run for the last 5 days:

It has been a blast, I have to say. The street is at just the right slope as to make the sled run fun but not “too exciting”, if you know what I mean.  Also, one of the neighborhood kids created a little sled jump for that little added adrenaline rush for that run down the hill.

On top of all that, on Saturday night we had what was probably something that could only happen in the PNW (although, I will concede that it’s possible in areas of the South with little snowfall).  We had a neighborhood block party!

And it was pretty much an all-out block party including the obligatory barbeque (sausages, etc.), plastic lawn furniture, wine and champagne, milling about, and kids doing their own thing.  It was as surreal as it was totally amazing to have the neighborhood out there enjoying the snow and acting as if it were the middle of July except that it was 25 degrees outside.  Plenty of fun, and good neighborship to be had.  And the kids were maxed out to boot.  Within minutes of them getting into bed, they were out cold.  The perfect end to a perfect evening.

Dear CyberpowerPC;

I purchased a PC from you in May of this year. I admit that I was purchasing as much for price as anything else. I bought a PC several years ago from your virtual clone IBuyPower and didn’t really have any problems.  In any case, I got what was a fairly high-end PC at the time.  When I got it, however, it had proven to be a fairly finicky beast.  It was generally reliable, but would occasionally reboot while playing a graphics-instensive PC game.  I wrote that off as a problem with the Nvidia 8800 GTX Superclocked.

However, right around mid-September, all hell broke lose.  The PC stopped POSTing the BIOS and was basically dead in the water.  I contacted your support line and they walked me through removing and re-inserting my RAM and ultimately decided that I had a bad stick of RAM and a bad motherboard.  I was issued an RMA for both and they were shipped.

It’s not my preference to do a mobo replacement myself on a new PC, but you don’t offer free shipping back to you (more on that later).

So I got the replacement mobo and replaced it, which wasn’t exactly my favorite weekend activity.

Still, no BIOS POST.

At this point, I had no choice but to return the unit.  And $120 later, it was on its way.  After a couple of weeks of it being gone, I was notified that you had once again replaced the motherboard, all 4GB of RAM, the graphics card, and the wireless card.  Holy cow!  WTF happened to the system!  I noted that practically everything but the hard drives were replaced.

Well, got it back and up and running with a fresh install of Vista and all seemed peachy for about a month.  And then, all of a sudden, I would get into a BSOD loop.  It wouldn’t boot.  Not even off the DVD most of the time.  Mind you, I had just got this back.  I managed to reinstall Vista finally, but it would start the BSOD cycle of death shortly thereafter.  This wasn’t a driver problem.

So I called your support line again.  Now, I didn’t mention earlier how difficult it is to actually SPEAK to someone in support.  It takes quite a bit of patience and persistence to finally get someone to pick up the phone.  When I finally got a hold of someone, I explained to him what was happening and that my investigations seemed to point to the HARD DRIVE(S) as the source of the problem.  But because this problem didn’t surface within the “2-3 week period” from getting my PC back, you will not pay for the shipping BACK to you to resolve this problem.

So once again, I am stuck with having to RMA the hard drives and replace them myself rather than send my PC back to you to get it taken care of.

Now, let me relate to you another OEM experience I am currently having.  I bought my wife an HP laptop in Dec. 2006.  You will note that it’s been exactly TWO YEARS since the purhcase.  Well, her laptop has been showing signs of GPU failure, most likely due to the bad Nvidia Mobile GPU’s that were used during the last couple of years.  Unfortunately for me, her laptop didn’t make it onto the “effected models” list for some crazy reason.  Well, I asked to speak with an escalation manager WHO TOOK CARE OF ME.  While he didn’t outright admit to it, he knew that my laptop was affected by this.  But he threw me a bone, and you know what?  This is what he did:

• He shipped my a box to ship the laptop in (NOTE: I threw away my Cyberpower box and asked you if you would ship my one AT MY EXPENSE, but you wouldn’t).
• He paid for ALL shipping back and forth
• HP is going to do the mobo replacement on the laptop FREE OF CHARGE

THIS is good customer service.  And I didn’t have to call back a zillion times and be on hold.  HE called ME….. TWICE.

All I want is for my half-year-old PC to work.  And by that, I mean boot reliably and stay up until I shutdown.  But you don’t seem to give a rat’s ass about it now that you made the sale.  Your service technician wouldn’t even give me the name/email of a manager.  Oh, and let me throw on my Microsoftie hat for moment and add that you are partially responsible for destroying the Windows brand.  For all the grief I give the “Genius Bar”, at least Apple trains its people to take care of their customers, which is far more than I can say about you.

So, thank you, CyberpowerPC.  I hope to eventually get over all my hardware woes with this computer. Rest assured, however, that when it comes time to buy a new machine sometime down the road, I will not hesitate to eliminate CyberPowerPC from the list of possible vendors given the poor customer service – and, frankly, quality – I’ve experienced with this machine.  I hope that the experience between now and when I get all my problems resolved can at least be tolerable.

Thank you,

Jim

P.S.  Also note that I have yet to have the motherboard charge credited back to me for the RMA.  I have to call Accounting to get that resolved.

P.P.S.  When I got the “repaired” machine back, you neglected to hook up the front ports.  So all the USB, headphone, microphone ports in the front do not work.  Sloppy.

There’s a threat of snow here in Seattle later today and into tomorrow. It’s always amusing what happens on the lead up to the actual snow. There’s always equal amounts of eager anticipation and dread, it seems.

And, of course, it gives the local news stations a chance to deploy all of their reporters throughout the city to report on snowfall and the expected traffic impact.

Also, it allows local grocery stores to run through all of their current stock of bread and supplies as people hunker down and prepare for the End Times.

It’s all worth it, though, if there’s enough snow to sled on.

See you on the other end of Armageddon.

Our little guy lost his first tooth on Thursday night. It was quite an event. Naturally, we discussed the impending arrival of the tooth fairy. We wondered how the tooth fairy knows which kids have a tooth under their pillows (via the teeth sending out magic fairy dust), and how she was able to make all of the visits, etc.

It was at the same time a very logical and scientific discussion as well as a totally fantastical one. Kinda funny, actually.

So on Friday morning, he woke up and found a whole dollar left for him. He totally bought into the whole spiel, which for me is both very cool and slightly disappointing.

But this time in kids’ lives is so short and terribly precious, and I know there will come a time where I look back wistfully on this time and wish it were still here.

So, here’s to the tooth fairy! And may we enjoy many more visits.